Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093)

by Seymour, Gerald

  ‘In the trial, friend, where did you finish?’

  ‘Last – where else?’

  Yashkin swerved. Laughter convulsed him. He had one hand on the wheel and the other gripped his friend’s sleeve. He felt his stomach rise and his eyes were wet with tears. His friend laughed with him. Yashkin did not know how he missed a puddle as big as a lake – his view of the road and the fields was misted. His friend looped an arm round his shoulders and pulled him close. The Polonez rang with their laughter, spittle was on their lips and chins, and his chest hurt. Then they were coughing and spluttering.

  Molenkov said, ‘I promise I’ll try not to talk about it.’

  Yashkin said, ‘It would be good to see the trotting horses stabled in the Bryansk oblast. I believe they’re fine animals.’

  The rain hammered on the tin roof of the woodsman’s home. Water leaked from the ceiling and pattered to the floor, but a steady, firmer dribble splashed on to the table where he sat. His shotgun was down from its wall hooks, broken on the table, but loaded. His dog was alongside his chair and its head rested on his lap. The only movement that Tadeuz Komiski made was to ruffle the fur below the dog’s collar. He should have been outside, in the rain, at work.

  When the forestry men had cleared a rectangle of planted pines, they had taken only the best, the straightest, trunks and had sliced off the lower branches and upper sprigs. The trunks were hauled away to the depot at the village and there they were cut into lengths to be used as props in coal mines far to the south-west. They were loaded on to rail wagons that were stopped in a line beside the raised platform, then shunted on to the tracks of the main line out of the village. It was the same raised platform that had been used when he was a child … and he could not escape from the memories of those long-ago days.

  The work he took for himself was to go into the forest on his ancient tractor, with his chain-saw on the trailer and his axe, and drive to one of the rectangles that had been cleared most recently for props. He had few skills and was devoid of sophistication, but could keep the tractor’s engine maintained, and the chain-saw. The tractor had been his father-in-law’s, given to him as a present in 1965 on the day he had married Maria. To have let the tractor rust, to have abandoned it, would have been the equivalent of disowning the memory of his wife, who had died from the curse with her stillborn child. It was from the tractor’s seat that he had first found the old grave where the flood rains had washed earth and compost from the body’s bones. Because of that grave, and the curse it had brought down on him, he believed himself watched.

  When he went to those cleared rectangles he could find enough of the pine trunks, left by the foresters, to cut into rings and split. With a day’s work behind him, he would have a trailer-load of fresh pine logs, with the resin still sticky in them. They spat and crackled in a fire, but threw off good heat. He would drive his load away down the forest tracks, then come to the road and dart across it – because he had no licence or insurance. He would approach the village from a rutted farm path, and reach the priest’s home. There he would throw out the logs, by hand, into a loose heap, and they would be used in the church boiler, the priest’s house and in the homes of parishioners too enfeebled to gather their own wood. He would be paid, not much but something. Enough to go to the shop in the village and buy bread, milk, and sugar, if it had been a big load, and the noodles that came in plastic packets, broth for soup, and a sack of dried meal for his dog.

  A man had sat in the forest with his back against a tree. A man had disturbed the dog. A man had waited silently for a sight of him … and he thought the curse revisited his life. He had gathered no wood.

  His stomach growled. His own hunger he could accept, but there was only one more day’s food in the sack for the dog.

  Tadeuz Komiski knew it: it would be the dog’s hunger that drove him from his home into the forest, where the curse waited for him, and there was a grave, and a man watched for him.

  ‘And then we have something we’ve called Haystack which is in the bailiwick of dear Christopher Lawson, who is currently up and running in Germany …’

  As a junior liaison officer, she had never before attended such an august meeting. It was held once a week. Officers of the Secret Intelligence Service and the Security Service came together to brief, with a mutual minimum of detail, those of the sister organization. But her line manager, who would ordinarily have gone to such a meeting with his deputy, had that morning entered hospital for a keyhole hernia operation and would be off for four days, so she had been taken along by the deputy. The Security Service had already completed their description of current operations that had relevance to matters overseas, and the Secret Intelligence Service now listed their work that ‘might/could’ have ‘possible/probable’ implications for her people.

  ‘… and I understand we’ve had contact with you concerning a mafiya player, Russian, named Josef Goldmann and living in London. Don’t get me wrong, anything involving dear Christopher Lawson must be of the greatest importance to national security, and of course he has Pettigrew’s full backing, but the name “Haystack” must tell us something. You know, needles and that. My impression is that haystacks are seldom successfully searched …’

  This was a colleague talking. Mistrust between VBX on the south side of the river and Thames House on the north bank was legendary. To SIS, the men and women of her Service were plodding bureaucrats who were fit for not much more than washing dishes; to her Service, SIS were arrogant pedants with a consistent but not admitted record of under-achievement. So, little of value was exchanged at the weekly sessions. They were, that week, on VBX territory – well, not actually inside that citadel of appalling architectural ugliness but in an anteroom off the building’s main lobby. The meetings were a leftover, a knee-jerk, from the catastrophe of the seven-seven explosions in the capital, when it had been convenient for both parties to blame the other for non-cooperation as an excuse for the failure to identify four suicide attackers.

  ‘What I can say of Haystack’s pedigree is that we’re not trumpeting this with allies and friends, and you may draw your own conclusions. Anyway, that’s Haystack, and that concludes what we have. Of much greater importance are Sapphire and Nineveh. I’m sure you’d like to take coffee with us before going back over the river.’

  Operation Sapphire involved the movement of small-arms weapons from the Balkans into the UK, and Operation Nineveh followed the killing of a Manchester-reared Muslim by American troops in a gunfight in southern Baghdad. The meeting broke up. A series of thoughts flooded her. The man she had met in the tipping rain at the end of the bridge, his responses of brusque courtesy, his compliments on her briefing, and what she had asked him: Imminent danger? … Where are we on a scale of one to ten, Mr Lawson? And gazing into those eyes, seeing nothing manic in them, listening to his answer, hearing nothing blurted in it: A scale of one to ten? Probably between twelve and thirteen. She had believed him – utterly, totally. And he was rubbished by his own.

  She went to the side table where a coffee percolator bubbled. She poured herself a cupful.

  From behind her, ‘Haven’t seen you here before – hope you didn’t find it too crushingly dull.’

  She said that, in fact, she had found it interesting and informative – and that her superior was in hospital for surgery so she had been pressed into service.

  ‘Good to come mob-handed, and I noticed you took a shorthand note, as we did, so there can’t be any misunderstandings on who said what and when. That’s the damn scene today, inquests and blame passing. I’m Tony, and you are?’

  She said she was Alison, and that she had found the report on Haystack particularly interesting and informative.

  ‘Ah, the missing needle.’

  She said she had ferried information on Josef Goldmann across the river, and had met Mr Lawson.

  ‘And what did you think of dear Christopher Lawson, the originator of Haystack?’

  She shrugged, and said she was onl
y a courier.

  ‘Well, Alison, you might just be one of life’s favoured fortunates. Christopher Lawson is a shit – an alpha-grade, gold-medal shit. In this building, from top to bottom, he is cordially detested. Delights in putting people down, belittling them where it hurts most, which is in front of their peers, gets some sort of perverse pleasure from serving up humiliation.’

  She saw the colour rise in his cheeks when he remembered what Christopher Lawson had visited on him.

  ‘I was late, easy enough mistake. My first trip to Berlin – anyone could have made it. The rendezvous with an agent was for fourteen hundred hours in a café in the Moabit district. I had it in my mind that it was for four o’clock, not fourteen hundred. Of course, at four o’clock the agent had stopped waiting. He treated it, fucking Lawson did, as if I’d farted at a Palace reception, bawled me out in front of all the section, was just vicious. The next morning he presented me with a gift-wrapped package. I had to open it, everyone watching, and it was a Mickey Mouse wristwatch, and he said, “When the little hand points to Mickey’s left ear it’s fourteen hundred.” Never let me forget it. Every damn time he came into the section he’d remind me … People don’t matter to him. He uses them.’

  She didn’t recognize from this the man at the end of the bridge … and she thought of the water running on the plastic sheeting protecting a photograph, and what she had said: This one’s as interesting as it gets. Jonathan Carrick … he’s a phoney … personal records … erased and replaced … what they do for policemen, those going undercover. And words just told her that had chilled her: People don’t matter to him. He uses them. Two faces bounced in her mind, the one older, features shielded from the elements by the brim of a trilby hat, and the other quiet and unremarkable, but with a determined and almost bloody-minded jut to the jaw, but with the rainwater washing little streams over it. She had wanted to please so had offered the name and detail of Jonathan Carrick.

  She and her colleague were let out through Security and walked up on to the bridge. She glanced down, saw the place where photographs had been shown. She blinked, was responsible, had given the name of Jonathan Carrick … God.

  He looked around him. The overhead lighting was from low-wattage bulbs, and the furniture was heavy, dark wood. The doors ahead and behind him were painted a deep brown matt. It seemed a place of shadows.

  At the door, Mikhail had hugged Viktor perfunctorily. Inside the hall, his Bossman had bear-hugged Reuven Weissberg. At the entrance to the kitchen, his Bossman had kissed the cheeks of a frail elderly lady, who was dressed in black and who would have merged into the gloom but for the brilliance of her short-cropped white hair. Then he was introduced to her.

  He held her hand formally, loosely, as if frightened he might hurt someone so fragile, but her response was to grip him and he thought of her fingers as bent wire lengths that were tight on his hand. She did not speak to him but looked up into his eyes. He saw great depth and could not plumb it. He thought she stripped him, and all the while she held his hand he was aware that, from behind his shoulders, his Bossman and Reuven Weissberg spoke to her in tandem. He assumed his presence was explained. Was she satisfied with what she was told? He couldn’t say, but his hand was released.

  She beckoned him. He followed. She led him into a kitchen. Again, the lights were dulled. He thought it was a modern kitchen with the best work surfaces and a touch-button cooker, but an old, chipped, stained table and two scraped chairs with unravelling raffia seats competed with the smart units. On the cooker, water riffled at simmering point in dented saucepans. Carrick reckoned an old life had been inserted into a luxury modern apartment. On the table a single place was laid, but on a unit there was a pile of plates, all faded and each with broken edges. She pointed to the chair.

  Carrick sat.

  The woman had brought with her the baggage of her life. He understood that. The Bossman had told him, as they had crossed Berlin in the car, that she was the grandmother of Reuven Weissberg. He could see the night panorama of inner Berlin from the kitchen window. It was an apartment – he grinned to himself and nothing of it crossed his mouth – that a woman would die for and a man would kill for. But what he had seen was furniture and a kitchen that a charity shop, back home, wouldn’t have accepted. It was gear that would have gone unsold at a car-boot job. He had seen the deference with which his Bossman treated Reuven Weissberg; stood to reason that Reuven Weissberg was bigger, higher up the damn ladder, than his man.

  Carrick turned.

  She put four filled plates on to a tray, and there were four glasses. He thought from the cooking smells that she had prepared boiled pork, boiled potato and boiled cabbage. Carrick stood. He assumed it was right for him to carry the tray, but she waved him away. He sensed that her authority, an imperious and short-armed wave for him to stay seated, had been handed down to her grandson. She lifted the tray and shuffled out of the kitchen.

  He should never have agreed to being part of it, should have thrown it back in their faces.

  He saw the painting. Johnny Carrick knew nothing of art. He went into a gallery only when he escorted Esther Goldmann. He reckoned the picture had class but the frame was junk-shop stuff – it would have gone into a bin at the back of any of the galleries his Bossman’s wife patronized. The painting, though, was different. It was not that Johnny Carrick was inarticulate, or stupid, but looking at the picture that hung between a wall cabinet and the spokes for drying washing, he could not have explained its quality. Very simple. An impression of depth. The soft ochre colours of old leaves that the winter had not taken off birch trees, the darkness of pines making a canopy, the gold of rotted compost on the ground, and the trunks stretching into infinity. He pushed up from the chair, scraped its legs back on the vinyl floor, went closer to it. He gazed at the heart of it and wondered where it was, what it meant, and why it was the only thing of beauty he had seen in the apartment. There was also a photograph in a little cheap wood frame, faded and with broken lines across it as if it had been folded for a long time. It was set inside the wall cabinet, behind the glass. He had lingered on the painting, but he glanced at the monochrome photograph that would not have measured more than two inches by one. Another forest. A young woman holding a baby. She had pure white hair that showed against the darkness of the black tree trunks. She held the baby close.

  He should have quit. Should have made the excuse and refused to get on the aircraft, should have walked to the Pimlico office and confessed his fear.

  Fingers were on his shoulder, as sharp as bent wire. He spun, startled, a kid caught out gawping. She pointed to his chair. He sat.

  Should have cut and run – maybe would.

  The plate was put in front of him. Boiled meat, potatoes and cabbage steamed into his eyes. She stood in front of the painting, thin arms folded, and blocked it from his view. Her shoulder covered the photograph of a young woman with snow-white hair who held a baby.

  Carrick ate. She watched him, and he could read nothing of her mind.

  Chapter 9

  12 April 2008

  There were four hours available to him. Carrick did not recognize himself. Should have gone back into his room, locked the door, then set the small alarm beside his bed. He did not recognize himself because he had never before felt such uncertainty and loss of purpose.

  He did a part of what he should have done, was inside his room, had locked the door and armed the alarm, but he did not strip and crawl under the counterpane. Dressed, he sat on the end of the bed. The room’s walls seemed to press close, as if they intended to suffocate him. He could hear vague sounds seeping down the corridor, televisions, voices and footsteps, but they were nothing to him. At the heart of it was his feeling, deep held, that he wasn’t progressing in the infiltration. He had sat for nearly three hours in the kitchen, and the old woman had worked round him but had not acknowledged him. He might not have been there. No communication. His thanks for his meal, in English and understandable to an imbecile,
had not been accepted. An offer to go with the empty tray to collect the four plates had been ignored, and she had done it. He had sensed, though, when his back was to her, that her eyes were on him and their force had seemed to burn his neck. But if he turned and sought to meet them they had snapped off him. When they had left, when he had held out his hand, she had kept hers behind her back. He knew nothing of what had been discussed. The dilemma was clear to him: if he did not push for inclusion his time was wasted and he would learn nothing; if he pushed, he attracted greater attention and risked greater suspicion.

  Carrick left his room. He tiptoed down the corridor and past the doors to the anteroom, where Viktor would be in an easy chair, and to Josef Goldmann’s bedroom.

  Carrick took the lift down, rocking with its motion, and held the bars at the glass sides as it plunged. He could feel the weakness in his legs.

  He walked past the darkened reception desk, and past the night porter. The door was locked and he tried to force it. Panic rose. The night porter came to him and produced the key. Cold air hit him and chilled the sweat on his forehead, at his neck and groin. He had only his jacket on, no coat.

  Beyond the canopy above the door, rain fell on the pavement. He went out and heard the door closed behind him.

  Before him was the great edifice of a church, a ruin that was a monument. The orange lights from the street-lamps illuminated the rain on old stones still dark from the scorching of incendiaries. He did not know its name or history. He ducked his head and walked faster, skirting the square round the ruin. As he passed the church, a clock chimed – a mournful, doom-laden note – but Carrick did not recognize whether it struck the hour or a half. Dribbles of rain ran down his cheeks and forehead. He saw a cluster of drunks with bottles tilted to their mouths. One called to him and another started to lurch towards him but was pulled back, and he went on, left them behind. A girl beckoned to him. She had blonde hair that the rain disfigured and he thought the wet washed out the dye. He saw her heavy thighs below a short skirt, and went on, leaving her behind too. For much of his walk, though, there were no cars on the streets, and no winos, tarts or druggies on the pavement, only emptiness and the sound of his squelching shoes. He was off a main drag and crossed the side-streets between Kleiststrasse and Hohenstaufenstrasse where apartments were blacked out for the night and offices were charcoal-grey caverns behind their windows.